Writing about Adolph Eichmann in a two-part 1963 New Yorker article, later published as the bestseller Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “The banality of evil.” If she didn’t coin it, she certainly popularized it.
Right now on the London stage, there’s another face representing a different banality-of-evil face. It’s Maggie Smith performing as Brunhilde Pomsel, who tells the story of her working as a typist for Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during the 1930s and 1940s. Pomsel herself did so in the 2016 Christian Krönes-Olaf Muller-Roland Schrotthofer-Florian Weigensamer documentary. A German Life.
The play, also dubbed A German Life, by Christopher Hampton at the Bridge Theatre, is an intermissionless 100-minute monologue. Smith sits in an office-like room (Anna Fleischle is the set and costume designer) reminiscing about, and commenting on, her life before, during and after her job at a typewriter placed not many feet from the legendary Nazi hate-monger and eventual suicide.
The banality factor infused here is Pomsel’s description of an existence that, despite its proximity to evil, is for the most part no more overtly sinister in tone than what might have been divulged by a shop girl toiling on Berlin’s Avenue Kurfurstendamm.
As Pomsel, Smith banters about various quotidian matters as things began to shift in 1933 when Hitler came to power. She chats about the perks provided her—about, for instance, the canteen where she and her friends enjoyed cheerful hours. Other good times are freely itemized, though she does talk about Jewish friends who were disappearing from neighborhoods. Having momentary difficulty recalling the name given Kristallnacht in 1938, she eventually gets around to shrinking from those horrors.
Remembering Goebbels, she reports that he was difficult to know. She mentions a dinner to which he invited her and several co-workers, only to realize he wasn’t interested in them, that he ate quickly—expecting them to stop eating when he had—and that he departed just as rapidly, leaving them as ignorant of who he was as they were when they arrived.
Repeating familiar sentiments about not having any idea of what was going really on during the war, 103-year-old Pomsel (1911-2017) insists before her death at 106 that it was only as the war ended when she, along with thousands of others, learned about concentration camp realities. Until then, she had believed what she had been told: they were reeducation centers.
As the war ended, Pomsel was imprisoned by the Russians in Buchenwald for five years, a prison term about which she is initially sanguine. It wasn’t until years after her release that she realizes the refreshing showers she was able to take, if infrequently, in the shower building had earlier been utilized for different purposes.
Thinking about her incarceration prompts her to state that she feels no guilt about what she had no way to know. In regard to her own experiences, she comes to believe “there is no such thing as justice,” that there is only “evil” in the world. It’s in this punitive mood that she attempts to locate childhood friend Eva and learns that six Evas with the surname Pomsel remembers had perished in the camps, her friend one of them.
Perhaps the most chilling effect A German Life has is its ordinariness. The title suggests as much. Watching Pomsel speak through Smith, it’s possible, even likely, that as she exhibits any number of easily recognizable emotions, observers begin to wonder whether in the same circumstances they might have behaved the same. Though ready clues abounded throughout the society as to the occupying menace, how many German citizens behaved docilely then? How many citizens around the globe now might behave similarly when it’s quite clear, for instance, that anti-Semitism, that anti-Muslimism is on the rise?
As Pomsel, Smith returns in a play for the first time in 12 years—her last being a revival of Edward Albee’s The Lady From Dubuque—and the word has gotten around that, at 84, this will be her final stage appearance. Anyone watching her will hoot at the likelihood of that. Granted, she remains seated while playing the 103-year-old German interviewee, but she’s hardly compromised, definitely not by memorizing 100 minutes of text.
Since Pomsel’s age is not given here, Smith doesn’t approximate it, as smoothly directed by Jonathan Kent and swathed in Jon Clark’s lights and occasionally backed by Paul Groothuis’ muted but evocative ambient sound. Her performance is the height of naturalism. Just as the greatly-lined Pomsel presents herself in the documentary while trying to pinpoint events, Smith hesitates, stumbles over words, is startled by a sudden soothing or threatening memory, more than once hides her face in dismay, is now brought to smiles, now brought to tears. She’s a shuddering presence.
Yes, to be sure, Smith’s (last?) outing is a tour de four. Hardly a surprise for Smith fans. On the other hand, Pomsel’s autobiographicalizing is harshly surprising, as it’s revealed in this short, and perhaps only, run of the play. That makes a lucky break for all who get to be witness to it.
A German Life opened April 12, 2019, at the Bridge Theatre (London) and runs through May 11. Tickets and information: bridgetheatre.co.uk
